Monday, June 18, 2012

Chris and Ben attended the 2nd annual InstructureCon so I guess it's time for the annual post on the Canvas Guys Blog. This year it moved to beautiful Park City where the weather cooperated pretty much the entire time!

This year the theme was AWESOME things. So I get to talk about the 10 most awesome things about the conference.


10. Awesome talk by Choffman: How to Keep a Faculty Journal: A Guide for Educators. Instructure gave me another chance to present (Fool me once shame on you...) to a great group of people. The audience was fun, interactive and had great questions. I felt like we had a great conversation. I think that Instructure will be getting a few phone calls on how to setup the faculty journal in the near future.


9. Awesome food and drinks: Everywhere. Although my personal favorite was the chocolate covered churros.


8. Awesome API presentation: Zach "With the Pants" Pendleton. Zach gave an entertaining and informative presentation about the Canvas API and how it can be used. It gave me a few good ideas and made me feel like even I, someone who gave up on a CS degree years ago, could try it out.


7. Awesome OER presentation: People filling in for David Wiley. OER Glue is now Open Tapestry. the presentation was a slow burn. They setup the problem of finding and capturing OER objects well enough. Then they actually showed the tool (which didn't always work.) And just when I thought to myself "What's the difference between this and Evernote?" the presenter brought up a webpage and started deleting the parts of it that he didn't want to save. WOW! Jaws dropped and I asked how much it costs. They're really onto something here, can't wait to see where it goes.


6. Awesome D&D references: Level Up - Canvas as an Educational Gaming Platform by Gerol Petruzella. he combines Canvas, D&D and Philosophy to create a fun learning experience. Check it out here: http://mcla.academia.edu/GerolPetruzella


5. Awesome Powerpoint alternative: Canvas as envisioned by Rebekah Grow of the University of Utah. Rebekah has a unique way to use Canvas as a presentation tool that you can see here at modules: https://utah.instructure.com/courses/49573/modules


4. Awesome community relations: Matt Mcghie's How to Win Friends and Influence Canvas Users. Matt always does a great job presenting. He showed off some great features of the Canvas community that I'm going to start making sure I use more. Plus he had this funny outtakes video: http://vimeo.com/44250826


3. Awesome movie watching experience: Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark with Jason Gilbert. Wow, this guy is crazy funny and really smart. MST3K has got nothing on him.


2. Awesome look into the future: Canvas Network. This tool will be a game changer. No one in the LMS world is thinking this way except Instructure Canvas. In a nutshell, Canvas Network will allow an unprecedented amount of sharing and collaboration across users, courses, institutions and continents. Good stuff.


1. Sergio "Mr Sexy Sax Man" Flores crashing the Keynote!

It's hard to beat meeting someone from the internet.

Thanks again to everyone who made IstructureCon such a big hit. See you again next year.

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